On Holocaust Remembrance Day, sadness — and resolve

OPINION:

Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Recently, I have been thinking a great deal about my paternal grandparents, whom I never met because they were murdered before I was born.

For me, they have been merely images in grainy black-and-white photographs, serious-looking people standing in front of a modest wooden house in northeastern Poland.

As a child, I heard vague allusions to their lives and, especially, their deaths. I was told that they had died in something called a gas chamber. For a long time, I could not imagine what that meant; it did not sound real. Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I would often visualize an elderly couple suddenly appearing and telling us the news of their deaths was just a terrible mistake.

Those “elderly” grandparents were actually far younger than I am now, and, sadly, they never appeared. Slowly, I began to understand that they had been deprived of their lives simply because they were Jewish, just as I am.

On Saturday morning, as I sat in my seat at the Georgetown synagogue, which I attend without fail, my thoughts turned to those grandparents. I considered the Hebrew prayers I was reciting, prayers my ancestors have been reciting for millennia, in which we praise and thank God for our lives and the multitude of blessings that have been bestowed upon us.

I reflected that it was for doing this — in the particular manner that has been handed down through so many generations — that my grandparents were murdered.

Until recently, it was a consoling fact that the brutality visited upon my grandparents and millions of other Jews could never happen again.

As proof, I could note that for most of my life, I didn’t encounter violence because of my religion. In fact, while in elementary school, high school, college and law school, it often seemed as if much of the world around me was Jewish. Many of my friends and acquaintances were Jewish and led comfortable, seemingly untroubled lives.

Antisemitism may have existed, but it was marginal at worst.

For most of my professional life as a practicing lawyer, I have not encountered any discrimination by reason of my faith. Over the years, there were occasional hints of antisemitism, but they were usually distant manifestations — in the Middle East or in Europe, with very few occurring in the United States.

Over the course of the past decade, though, we began to hear rumblings of antisemitism, first from radical left-wingers and then from some on the political right. These seemed to be of only tangential significance, albeit a steady drumbeat. Then came the terrible events of Oct. 7, 2023, when some 1,200 Israelis were brutally massacred in a pogrom whose savagery, in some ways, surpassed the brutality of the Holocaust.

Yet instead of being met with unanimous outrage and condemnation, these murders were followed by an avalanche of antisemitic rhetoric, even violence.

At first, the antisemitic expressions seemed to be coming only from Islamists and radical left-wingers, but the venom spread. College campuses and social media became filled with them. Jews everywhere seemed to become the targets of antisemitic invective, usually couched in the form of a more acceptable “anti-Zionism.”

Commentators and mainstream politicians could be heard espousing, first subtly and then more overtly, many of the old antisemitic tropes. Allegedly, Jews were intentionally killing children, causing starvation and prompting every other imaginable evil.

In an intolerable inversion of reality, it was even said that Jews were intentionally committing genocide.

New York City, the most Jewish urban center outside Israel, elected as mayor a man who does not hide his antisemitism, refusing to condemn shouts of “Globalize the Intifada,” a call to rid the world of Jews.

Defending Israel or Jewish ideas, even evoking the Holocaust, has suddenly become dangerous. One national law firm, in the wake of Oct. 7, refused to allow public discussion of the role lawyers played during the Holocaust. That is a subtle form of Holocaust denial.

Shockingly, the terrible fate experienced by my martyred grandparents, which once seemed so incomprehensible, has begun to seem potentially replicable.

Yet there is a difference.

Informed by the knowledge of what happened a mere 80 years ago, many of my fellow Jews and I are prepared to avoid the atrocious fate that befell my grandparents.

My wife and I own firearms and have been training to protect ourselves. Although I remain relatively confident that Americans will confront and reject the current wave of antisemitism, if ever antisemitism should develop such that antisemites decide to come to harm us, as they came for my grandparents, they will be confronted.

We will not go quietly. One generation of millions of Jewish martyrs is more than enough.

• Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington office of a national law firm. He is the author of “Lobbying for Equality, Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights during the French Revolution,” published by HUC Press.